All You Need To Know About Spotify Going Public

Currently, the music streaming service boasts 71 million paying subscribers, an impressive figure given that Spotify only had 20 million paid subscribers in June of 2015.

The strong early trading for Spotify came on the heels of a steep USA equity selloff led by tech stocks, although the market had found firmer footing at midday.

Spotify is a company that has been burdened with issues particularly in the latter half of its existence. Launched in 2008, the company claims to have almost 160 million monthly active users, across dozens of countries. Spotify has also made it clear that it intends to remain focused on adding more subscribers instead of making money for now. Usually, the banker's role is to recruit investors and push the stock to a successful debut, including buying shares to stabilize the first few days of trading and without that security, the stocks could be more volatile. Apple Music, however, was growing at a much faster rate than Spotify: 5% versus 2%.

Pedestrians walk past a banner with the Spotify logo on it as the company lists its stock on the New York Stock Exchange with a direct listing in New York, U.S., April 3, 2018. The company is using an unusual direct listing process rather than the standard process used for nearly all IPOs. Spotify's current chief financial officer, Barry McCarthy, held the same job when Netflix went public and remained in that position until leaving the video service in 2010.

"It's an untested process", said Matt Kennedy, IPO market strategist for Renaissance Capital LLC, an investment research firm. And it feels like the right time to pause and acknowledge the thousands of Spotify employees around the globe who helped build out the Spotify ecosystem while staying true to who we are and what we believe.

Ahead of Spotify going public, CEO Daniel Ek on Monday published a blog post celebrating the occasion while also explaining why the company opted to go public via a direct listing as opposed to a traditional IPO. "Spotify has been the driving force in nothing less than a turnaround in the U.S. recorded music industry". The only problem was, they rose the flag of Switzerland instead. A direct listing eliminates those restrictions and allows them to potentially profit from the IPO immediately. But what's even more important to me is that tomorrow does not become the most important day for Spotify.

The NYSE had set a reference price of $132 for the stock, though the actual price will be determined by shareholders. As much as this sounds like great news, what does this floatation really mean for the company?

"If the stock is choppy when it takes off the stabilization agent attempts to create a floor of where the stock price could go", said Lise Buyer, an IPO consultant with Class V Group in Silicon Valley.

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